


Toon in Tomorrow!

by FunConditional



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Cartoon Physics, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, More Cartoon Physics than is Probably Advised, Peter B. Parker is Bad at Mornings, Post-Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), Spider-Verse, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-11 15:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19930468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FunConditional/pseuds/FunConditional
Summary: "The funny thing about ‘mad scientists’ is that they’ve got this tendency to find odd things very, very interesting. For example, a cartoon, web-slinging pig may be considered ‘odd’ in this dimension, and therefore ‘very, very interesting’. In an attempt to draw as little attention to himself as possible, he’s been keeping the cartoon antics to a minimum and only going out under cover of night.Unfortunately, villains are just as prone to favouring that particular time of day."_There's always another villain to thwart, and when dealing with dimensional shenanigans, things get - naturally - a little more complicated. Ham's got a pretty good idea what'll happen if his dimension were to leak into Miles's, and he's prepared to prevent it at any cost.(On hiatus until the demand of college upon my free time becomes less of an imposition.)





	1. Toast

“Hey Peanut, wake up and smell the coffee!”

Peter B. Parker wakes with a start when the smell of coffee very suddenly overwhelms his senses. He looks around the living room to find there’s no one there, and frantically sits up in the armchair he most definitely did _not_ pass out on the night before. 

“Whoa there, champ, you want me to spill it?” The voice had come from above and sounded suspiciously like Spider-Ham's, but when he looks up there’s no one stuck to the ceiling. Had the little cartoon learned invisibility? He’d done weirder things before for the sake of a sight gag. 

Slouching his shoulders, Peter rests his chin in his hand and sighs. It’s much too early for this sort of thing... is what he would say if he disregarded the clock on the wall. A cartoonish, red-clad hand slowly lowers a mug of steaming coffee in front of his nose. Without a word, Peter huffs and accepts it. Spider-Ham hops down from... somewhere... and lands on the floor in front of him, tapping a foot and crossing his arms. He’s fully dressed in his uniform, but there’s a frilly pink apron tied around his waist. 

“You missed breakfast again. I can pour you a bowl of cereal but other than that you’re on your own,” Ham says. Peter makes a mental note to figure out when Ham became the team mom. There’s something a little more pressing on his groggy mind right now, though. 

“Where... where did you come from...?” He asks, regretting the words as soon as they’re out of his mouth. Of course, without missing a beat, Ham is sitting on the arm of the chair wearing a pair of glasses and a little tweed sport coat, scribbling on a notepad.

“No one really knows where we come from, but some experts like to believe th-”

“Stop, please stop. You know what I meant.”

“Of course I do. On an unrelated note, what did you mean?” Ham asks, tilting his head to the side. He’d abandoned the glasses and tweed and Peter honestly can’t tell for the life of him if he’d known what he meant or not. 

“Where...” He pauses, trying to choose his words carefully while his mind’s still in the process of booting up for the day. To his credit, Ham waits very patiently.

“Where were you when you woke me up just now?”

“I was standing on your head.”

“... what.”

“I was standing on your head.”

“No... no I got that.” Peter takes a long, scalding sip of his coffee. “How come I didn’t feel you up there?” Ham pauses, stares at him for a moment, and then waves a hand as he hops off the arm of the chair. 

“Goodnight everybody!” 

Peter buries his face in his free hand.

“What I _meant_ ,” he says, voice muffled, “is how come I couldn’t feel your feet on top of my head?”

Ham sighs, actually _sighs_ , and starts to pace the floor. After maybe fifteen seconds, he stops, turns, shrugs, and says “Cartoon physics?”

Peter can’t tell if he doesn’t know or if he just doesn’t know how to explain it to him; if it’s the latter, he’s a little bit offended that Ham thinks he wouldn’t understand it. Taking another sip of coffee, he levels a skeptical look at the pig.

“Is it really that complicated?” 

“Not to me.”

“Ouch.” Peter leans back in the chair and frowns. Ham waves an arm as though batting away a particularly pesky fly before resuming his spot on the arm of the chair. He then proceeds to poke Peter very pointedly in the chest. 

“Look, I’m not saying you can’t understand it because it’s complicated, Peanut. If anyone could understand it, it’d be you and the others. We’re all scientists, here. But I can’t explain it to you scientifically because to me, it’s not a science, it’s an instinct. Drink your coffee.”

Peter startles slightly at the sudden shift in topic, but begrudgingly takes a drink, muttering “All right, I guess I’m less offended.” Ham nods once, and then stands up.

“I’m going to stand on your head again.” Before Peter can react, Ham is gone and he feels the small weight of two little pig feet further messing up his already messy hair. 

“What are you doing?” He asks, nearly dropping the mug of coffee. 

“Proving a point. You can feel my feet now, right?”

“Yeah... how...?”

“Because you know I’m up here; that’s how it works.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does! Your universe has its laws of physics, right?”

“Yeah?”

“So does mine, but for every law, there are exceptions, and each of those exceptions has its own set of rules. Everyone in my dimension knows what those exceptions and rules are from the second they’re conscious.” Ham explains, leaning over to look him upside-down in the eye. Peter mulls over Ham’s use of ‘conscious’ and its implications for a moment before another thought strikes him.

“You’re not very heavy.”

“My relationship with gravity is significantly less one-sided than yours,” Ham says, and then he swings away into the kitchen. Clearly, they’re through with this conversation. He can hear the clattering of dishes as he rubs at his eyes, trying to help the caffeine wake him up. What a way to start the day. He’d gotten into a scrap with some up-and-coming villain in his own dimension the day before, and that knock to the head he’d gotten is giving him one heck of a battle hangover. It’s probably why no one had bothered to wake him up before noon; they could all tell how tired he’d been last night. It’s odd, to say the least, having so many people around who understand the spider-gig as well as he does, and who are willing to take care of each other as a... well, as a family. 

He polishes off the rest of the coffee, and his back protests the change of position when he stands to bring the mug back into the kitchen. Ham has gone back to wearing that frilly pink apron, and when he notices Peter heading for the sink, he instead directs him towards the kitchen table where a bowl of Spidey-O's and a carton of milk are waiting. The empty coffee mug is webbed out of his hand before he can do anything with it, though Peter doesn’t put up much protest; he just changes course and sits down at the table. 

“Where is everyone?” He asks, pouring milk into his bowl of cereal. 

“Gwen and Miles are at school, and they took Peni with them to check out the science fair. May’s shopping, Noir’s somewhere, probably, and you’re sitting at the table.”

“Oh really, and where are you?”

“On the counter, doing dishes.”

“Want help?”

“Eat your cereal.” Ham says in answer, reaching up to put the freshly-washed mug back in its cupboard. Peter eats his cereal. There’s too much sugar in these ‘Spidey-O's’, but they’re fruity and the sweetness offsets the taste of the coffee. He watches as Ham puts the dish-drying rack away. What does a cartoon pig do all day in his own dimension? He’d seen Ham do a lot of menial chores around the house during spider-gang visits, and he’d watch TV or read the newspaper when there were no chores to do. It struck him as odd that a cartoon pig wouldn’t spend his time doing things that are more... lively. Peter’s sure May appreciates the help, though, and maybe that’s the only motivation Ham needs. 

“You’re staring,” Ham says from across the kitchen, snapping his fingers a few times to get Peter’s attention. Peter blinks, spoon of cereal halfway to his mouth. He hadn’t realized. 

“Uh,” he says, setting the spoon back down in his bowl.

“Don’t worry about it, everyone’s been doing that today,” Ham replies with the dismissive wave of a hand.

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone’s been asking me questions all morning about me and my dimension. It’s weird, right? Something’s up and I think we’re all sensing it.”

“And you think it has something to do with your dimension?” Peter asks, cereal forgotten.

“Or me, and I kind of hope it’s just me. There’s a reason I don’t invite any of you over for tea and biscuits.” Ham takes the apron off and hangs it over the oven handle. He’s done this before, and Peter knows if he looks away for a split second, the apron will have disappeared into thin air by the time he looks back. Ham joins him at the table, standing on the chair so he can see Peter properly. 

“What’s the reason?” Peter asks, because it doesn’t look like Ham’s going to elaborate. 

“Eat your cereal,” Ham answers, pointing at the abandoned bowl. Peter rolls his eyes, but eats another spoonful. It’s kind of soggy now.

“The average day in my dimension is a lot more dangerous than an average day in yours,” Ham says. “Not so much for me, but just like my own laws of physics carry over with me into this dimension, so would yours into mine. And you’re not built for my dimension.”

“But it’s just cartoons, right? Nothing actually hurts anyone.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Let’s pretend we’re in my dimension. The villain of the week has a flamethrower-”

“A flamethrower?”

“They’re very common. The villain of the week has a flamethrower, and they yell “YOU’RE TOAST” and then they hit me with the fire. There are three things that could happen. One: I get charred from head to foot and cough out a puff of smoke. Two: I get charred from head to foot, cough out a puff of smoke and crumble into dust. Three: I turn into a literal slice of toast. In all three scenarios, I would be _fine_. If they hit _you_ with the flames, you’d just die, and the villain would be traumatized for life.” He pauses. “Eat your cereal.”

Peter does not eat his cereal. “Has that... has that actually happened to you?”

“What?”

“Being turned into... toast?”

“Yes, and it’s very strange, but it’s not the weirdest thing I’ve turned into.” 

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve turned into?” Peter asks, skeptical.

“A pig,” Ham answers, and web-slings himself into the living room. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there, folks! I know Spider-Ham isn't often the focus of a fic but it gives me the opportunity to explore the heck out of how cartoon physics might work in his 'verse. 
> 
> This hasn't been beta read, so if you notice any typos or other mistakes, feel free to let me know!


	2. Peanut Butter

It’s early in the evening, but the sun has already set for the night. Ham and Noir had gone out to patrol the city so Miles could catch up on his homework (this had less to do with actually ensuring the city’s safety and more to do with the fact that the two of them are the most distracting), and the rest of the group is lounging in May’s living room. They’d all gone to check up on their own dimensions a few hours earlier, and, with nothing obviously amiss, they’d reconvened. Each and every one of them was picking up something with their spider sense, telling them to pay attention to their little porcine teammate. Normally, they’d all have gone back home that morning, but then this whole weird feeling had come up and they had each individually decided to stick around. 

“Am I the only one that didn’t know this?” Peter asks, pacing the floor in exasperation.

“You were the only one that wasn’t listening, obviously,” Gwen answers. She has her arms crossed over the back of the couch, watching Peni play a game on a handheld console the girl had called a ‘Flip’. “He told us that when we met him.” 

“To be fair to Peanut, Noir and I were talking at the same time,”  Peni chimes in. Despite keeping up with the conversation happening outside of the game, she still sticks her tongue out in concentration as she plays. Miles, from the eye of his paper hurricane on the floor, pipes up.

“Don’t worry, Peanut, I didn’t catch it either.” Peter stops pacing and sighs. He should probably address the Peanut thing. 

So, three Peters, right? The first time they’d managed to get together after that whole collider thing, they figured they’d need a way to differentiate, you know, so there aren’t three separate Peters answering every time someone says their collective name. Nicknames was the obvious answer. Ham hadn’t cared too much, but had pattered off a million suggestions anyway. They’d all collectively decided that Noir was the perfect complement to the man’s whole aesthetic, and Noir, likewise, didn’t much care. Peter had suggested that he just keep his name the same, but Miles had argued that they might meet more Peters, and he just really, really wanted to give him a nickname, can they please give him a nickname, please?  So Peter relented, and Miles and Gwen spent a good half hour throwing potential nicknames to the wind. The rest of the group had left by the time Gwen suggested ‘Petey B’ and Miles countered that Peter didn’t strike him as a rapper .

“P.B.P.?”

“No... maybe just P.B.?”

“Peanut butter?”

“What?”

“You know, like, PB and J... peanut butter and jelly.”

And that’s when Ham came back and the whole thing went downhill from there. And so, in conclusion, he’s been stuck with Peanut.

And scene. Back to the plot. 

“Don’t worry, Peanut, I didn’t catch it either,” Miles says. “I wonder how that works, though; none of  _ us _ turned into spiders.”

"Haven’t you been paying attention?” Aunt May asks. She doesn’t look up from her book. “It’s just cartoon logic. If you were cartoons, you probably  _ would _ have turned into spiders.”

“I don’t think I’d want to be an actual spider,” Gwen says, throwing a glance at Sp//dr, “unless I had cool robot armour to keep me from getting stepped on.” Peter sits down in the armchair, resigning himself to the fact that this is the direction the conversation’s going to take. It’s been two and a half hours of commercials with the occasional TV show sprinkled in when Noir returns. They wouldn’t have known he’d entered the house at all if they hadn’t had their spider-senses to detect him, but he drops down from the ceiling into the middle of the living room when everyone looks up simultaneously. They’re all immediately on high alert when they notice there's a distinct lack of a certain pig with him. 

“Uh.... where’s Ham?” Gwen asks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a short one, I'll admit. It's a bit of an interlude before the action really gets going. 
> 
> I meant to post this yesterday (trying to keep a Monday schedule, here), and I'll try to maintain that Monday posting schedule until the fic is finished unless something unavoidable comes up. 
> 
> (Should have called it "Toon in Next Week", dagnabbit. Guess I'll have to save that title for the next one).


	3. Bacon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fun begins...

This... this is not how he had imagined his evening going, though he can’t say he’s altogether surprised. It’s what he gets for leaving the house. He was never this careful during the collider incident, but he hadn’t planned on sticking around back then. The problem with sticking around _now_ is that there are these fascinating people called ‘mad scientists’ crawling about the place, and the funny thing about ‘mad scientists’ is that they’ve got this tendency to find odd things very, very interesting. For example, a cartoon, web-slinging pig may be considered ‘odd’ in this dimension, and therefore ‘very, very interesting’. In an attempt to draw as little attention to himself as possible, he’s been keeping the cartoon antics to a minimum and only going out under cover of night. 

Unfortunately, villains are just as prone to favouring that particular time of day.

Ham takes a hard left out the back of an alley, propelling himself off the side of a building into a semi-residential area. He’s already running when he hits the ground, diving for a hideout of any kind in an attempt to shake the bot chasing him. He ends up under a car. Not ideal, but better than nothing. 

The bot looks to be something Doc Ock cooked up, judging by the... everything about it. Round metallic bodies, long extendo-tentacles, probably a camera for an eye – better to avoid that one if he can. At least it’s small; he’s seen some devastatingly large robots in his time, and this dimension doesn’t seem like the kind that would recover overnight from an attack like that. Right now, though, all he’s got to worry about is getting this thing off his case with minimal collateral damage. He stays perfectly still as the Octo-bot skitters around the area, looking a lot more like a giant metal spider than it ought to. Holding his breath, he carefully sticks his fingers to the car’s underbelly, preparing himself for the inevitable. It happens every time. Just when he thinks he’s safe, _BAM_ , bad guy finds his hiding spot. Makes for great suspense, but he’s done one too many horror parodies to _not_ see it coming. He counts it down, voice barely a whisper.

“Three... two... one...”

_ CRASH _

“ _There_ it is.” 

There it is, indeed; the unmistakable – well, in his line of work, anyway – sound of car chassis crunching under the stress of a robo-grip. The Octo-bot raises the car up into the air, investigating the ground beneath it with a series of whirrs and clicks. Ham clings to the bottom of the car, watching with a wary eye as he very, _veeery_ slowly starts to inch his way towards the driver’s side door. The bot’s... head? The bot’s head whirls around to train its camera eye on him just as he’s about to launch himself off the side of the car. He knows it’s a robot. He knows it has no sense of comedic timing. But just... that long, drawn-out pause that passes between them as they stare at each other. Silently. Unblinking. It would have felt right at home in one of his cartoons. 

He blows a raspberry. 

The Octo-bot reacts immediately, slinging a tentacle-arm at him from the side. He’s already hit the pavement, darting underneath the bot and webbing two of its legs together. It doesn’t topple over, but it’s off-balance enough that he can take advantage of the distraction to web-sling himself out of there. As soon as he’s out of sight around the corner of an apartment building, he climbs up the wall to the roof and hunkers down. If he’s being completely honest, this whole situation is getting on his nerves, and he’s seriously regretting having volunteered to do the rounds tonight. He could take this bot out easy as pie if he wasn’t trying to be careful. At the same time, they’d had that staring contest, and whoever’s on the other side of that camera eye can’t have missed how suspiciously small and pig-shaped he is. He comes to the conclusion that, either way, his bacon’s cooked. Time to cut his losses and book it out of there. Which would be a lot harder if he’d had an audience for that particular string of idioms. If he’d had an audience, which he most definitely does _not_ , he would have been obligated by the laws of cartoon physics to act out each and every one of those potential visual puns. Yes, it's certainly a good thing that he _doesn’t have an audience right now_. 

So... after a very long and gratuitous string of visual gags involving bacon, scissors, that one particular meme, and a vacation package, he manages to escape the notice of the Octo-bot. Or at least, that’s what he thinks as he picks himself off the roof to swing away, right up until he feels something sharp stabbing into his lower leg. He stumbles to the ground with a yelp and looks down, confused. There’s nothing there, but his leg is very much stuck to the tar roof of the apartment building, and, quite frankly, there’s a sizeable hole in his calf. He reaches out, wincing, and when his hand hits smooth metal, the Octo-bot's cloaking falters, and he sees exactly what it is that’s – quite literally – pinning his leg down. It’s a very specific kind of disturbing, he thinks, to see an absurdly large needle sucking... blood, maybe? out of his leg. Being a family-friendly toon, he’s never really given much thought to what his insides are made of because, usually, they stay on the _inside_ where they belong. Whatever the case may be, he should really deal with this. To heck with staying on the down-low, he can’t just let some mad scientist from another dimension steal his body's gooey interior. 

He’d drop an anvil if he had any confidence in the structural integrity of the roof he’s currently skewered to, but given that a few cracks have already appeared where the Octo-bot’s been carelessly stomping, he doesn’t want to risk bringing the roof down on the innocent apartment-dwellers' heads. Instead, he reaches into his personal hammer-space and pulls a very, _very_ large mallet out of his pocket before the Octo-bot has a chance to react, and he swings. The force of the hit is enough to send the bot flying... and it takes him right along with it. They’re still attached at the leg, you see, and Ham reflects upon this tiny detail as he sails through the air. 

“Ow ow ow ow ow...”

It’s not long before the Octo-bot's needle starts slipping out of his calf, however. They’ve reached the apex of their arc across the city sky when Ham finally manages to pull his leg free, pushing away from the bot and breaking off into a similar (but most importantly, different) trajectory. He lifts an arm and waves goodbye to his metal companion as he slows to a halt and, after a brief but necessary pause, plummets straight down. The ground is gaining on him fast, but since he’s not being careful anymore, he employs a variation of an old trick he saw in a cartoon once. Tearing the mask from his head, he grips it tightly and opens up the bottom. The screaming wind catches it and the mask expands with a ‘pop’ into a very large, very pig-shaped parachute. Ham nearly loses his grip as he’s yanked into a slower downward drift, but he recovers himself enough to steer for a rooftop and land relatively unharmed. He carefully pulls the mask back over his head with a breath of relief, and wiggles his leg to find that it has miraculously recovered from the stabbing. He tests it with a few creative kicks and minor acrobatics, but the last flip sends him stumbling on uneasy feet towards the edge of the roof. Is that... who's tweeting? He looks up to find a small yellow bird circling his head. And there's another one... and another... huh. He didn't think canaries were a nocturnal species. No, wait... dizzy. He's just dizzy. 

That's all right, then. 

He sways with the circular motion of the birds for a moment, trying to piece together what’s happened, but that becomes very quickly unimportant when he finds himself falling off the edge of the rooftop and passing out in a pile of back-alley trash. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> His bacon's cooked. Sizzled. Time to cut up that pile of 'Loss' memes and book a vacation to sunny Vancouver.


End file.
